yelvington.com

Now that Vin Crosbie's year of teaching at Syracuse is drawing to a close, he's talking about what he found in about a quarter of the faculty:

"They're obstructionists because they either deny things are changing (for example, one still thinks the Internet is a fad that will disappear) or they've grown too comfortable teaching the same curricula year after year for 20 or more years. They are tenured and so can't be fired, and the doctrine of academic freedom allows them to teach whatever they see fit."

I always thought the point of academic freedom had to do with research and ultimately the growth of human knowledge, not simply to teach whatever the hell you want.

So I looked it up in Wikipedia to see the current consensus definition from people with a surplus of time on their hands. Interestingly, the article is flagged that it "may not represent a worldwide view of the subject," but it does use these words:

"Academic Freedom is the belief that the freedom of inquiry by students and faculty members is essential to the mission of the academy. ... Academic tenure protects academic freedom by ensuring that teachers can be fired only for causes such as gross professional incompetence or behavior that evokes condemnation from the academic community itself."

So: Are academic luddites practicing academic freedom? I don't mean to be unkind, but are they perhaps merely professionally incompetent?

An academic position isn't a place to go hide from the storm. It's a great place to be a storm-chaser. It's sad to hear of people who've passed up that opportunity in favor of retiring on the job.

We're restarting our search at Morris DigitalWorks for a director of audience growth. This is a senior management position with significant responsibility. It involves working with all levels of leadership at the 13 daily Morris Publishing Group newspapers from Florida to Alaska, and some travel is required.

We're part of the Newspaper Consortium working with Yahoo and other national partners, and part of this job involves making sure our newspapers effectively execute programs that come to us from those relationships. But we're also looking for someone who can think strategically and work effectively with others at Morris DigitalWorks to design and deliver audience-focused programs that are unique to us.

Morris Communications is a privately held media company with diversified holdings that include newspaper and magazine publishing, outdoor advertising, radio broadcasting, book publishing and distribution, visitor publications and online services. Newspapers are the foundation and core business of the company, which has been owned by the Morris family since 1945. Today the Georgia-based enterprise reaches across the nation, has holdings in Europe and Asia and employs 6,000 people.

If you're interested or have any suggestions, contact me at steve@yelvington.com.

Earlier today I and a lot of other folks got an email from Vikki Porter, who's leading a Knight Digital Media Center conference for editorial page editors. "We are urging them to build credibility with their users by having the courage to send users elsewhere for info when they can't meet the need. As expected they are appalled. They want hard data to take home to convince their legacy managers this is a good idea."

My snarky reply was: "Yes, they do come back. And that's why Google's current market cap is 140.73 Billion USD." I refrained from mentioning McClatchy's plummeting valuation.

Snarky, but serious: Google has built an empire on sending people elsewhere while many newspaper editors seem to be living in the 1960s.

Get this point. It's a network, not just another distribution channel. Being part of it means linking and referring.

If my memory serves, I spoke twice at meetings of the National Conference of Editorial Writers in the mid-1990s, once in Madison, Wis., and once in San Antonio, Tex., about the opportunity that the online venue was presenting for a broader and deeper social conversation.

Of all the mini-disciplines within journalism, the opinion and community forum leadership role of the "editorial page" should be a natural fit with the conversational strengths of the Internet. And yet many editorial page editors seem utterly lost. Sad.

A new report from polling firm Zogby International has troubling signals for conventional media of all types:

70% of Americans think journalism is important to the quality of life in their communities.
67% think traditional journalism is out of touch with what Americans want from their news.
32% said Internet sites are their most trusted source for news and information.
22% said newspapers are the most trusted.
21% said television is the most trusted.
15% said radio is the most trusted.

But I'm not seeing any discussion of the survey methodology, which is troubling: "A sampling of Zogby International's online panel, which is representative of the adult population of the US, was invited to participate." This is not a conventional survey of the general population, but rather an online poll that's been weighted to adjust for the respondents' "region, party, age, race, religion, gender." I would not be taking this one to the bank on the issue of media preference.

The grumbling by some Associated Press members has "gone public" and is nicely summarized by Forbes writer Louis Hau, who asks: "Do newspapers still need The Associated Press? And does The Associated Press still need newspapers?" I discussed this last September when I wrote that "AP's goose has been in the oven for years." Not a lot has changed since then except for some editors objecting to AP's fairly reasonable efforts to perpetuate itself in the new world.

AP has announced it's restructuring and simplifying its member assessments (that's AP-speak for "pricing") in a revenue-neutral way. By definition, that means there will be winners and there will be losers.

Hau writes that "AP copy accounts for up to 40% or more of many a daily paper's news content," but that's not true of smaller daily newspapers, most of which are pulling back on global coverage and focusing entirely on local issues. Some have simply dropped AP service.

My employer owns a bunch of smaller newspapers. Not surprisingly, we came out slightly ahead in the rate restructuring.

Larger newspapers generally are likely to see increases, and some of them are complaining.

AP is a member-owned cooperative and a business. Under the direction of its newspaper owners, it's mutated into a company that derives only 30 percent of its revenues from U.S. newspapers, and those newspapers are clearly receding in importance as a "customer base." Any sound business strategy would have the AP focusing on growth areas such as new media and commercial sales.

For editors who are frustrated by the existence of new media, this is no comfort. But the AP's new plan actually has some benefits for newspapers, at least in theory. Members will be able to choose from a much broader selection of content, including much that's not available to commercial customers.

Here's the idea: Local interest isn't entirely defined by geography. If you're editing a newspaper in a cotton-producing area such as West Texas, a cotton-related news item from afar might be of more interest than a news story from Dallas. So AP's plan is to let editors search pretty much everything and use what makes "local" sense, rather than requiring that a newspaper in a cotton town subscribe to a separate business wire in order to find out what's happening in Egypt.

In practice this doesn't work as well as you might hope, because all search technology falls short of what we imagine it to be, editors still have to dig through a pile in order to find the occasional gem, and the wire/copy desk has just about disappeared from the American newspaper scene due to budget cutting.

The big picture is that the old Associated Press is dead. It exists only in the imaginations of a few newspaper editors. The new Associated Press may find a path to survival, but it's not going to please those in the world it's leaving behind.

For me, the Super Tuesday round of primaries has one clear, across-the-board winner: The New York Times. Why? Because nytimes.com took advantage of one great advantages of the online medium over broadcasting, offering a wealth of highly local detail through a very nice drill-down interactive graphical interface.

The #1 national newspaper managed to be very local, offering me data on how the vote in Columbia County, Ga., where I live, compared with the vote in other counties in Georgia.

I was disappointed by the political blogs I examined, many of which seemed to be trying to play the role best suited to the broadcast networks: top-level "candidate X wins state Y" pronouncements. The real strength of the blogosphere is that you find pearls of real insight mixed in with the dross. Energy that should have been going into thought was, instead, going into the relaying of facts that were widely available elsewhere.

I can't comment in depth about the broadcast coverage. I put the TV MSNBC and the Olbermann-led crew hasn't driven me to go find the channel changer.

"If the only tool you have is a hammer," said psychologist Abraham Maslow, "you tend to see every problem as a nail." I thought about that as I examined a couple of recently launched websites: The Industry Standard and NotchUp, both of which bear the "beta" label acknowledging their concepts are only partially baked.

The original Industry Standard was a business magazine aimed at the magical new economy that was being created by the Internet. It went dot-poof when the first dot-boom turned out to be a dot-bubble that dot-burst.

The new Industry Standard is a website, but it's not an online magazine. While it has some news and opinion that a writer would recognize, it's really a "prediction market" that attempts to capture and wisdom from the community. You "bet" on positions, such as "Yahoo to accept Microsoft acquisition." If you're right, you win virtual money that gives you a more powerful voice in future "betting." In theory, the result is a powerful indicator, like the stock market.

NotchUp is an employment marketplace built not around scarcity of jobs, but scarcity of good candidates from specific jobs. The big twist on the usual "post your resume and get a job" offer is that NotchUp promises to charge the potential employer for the contact information and pay you for the interview.

You also get some sort of percentage on anyone you recruit to join the system, a viral marketing trick that explains why I got a blizzard of invites over two or three days.

Both of these sites, interestingly, are built on the open-source Drupal CMS platform. This gets us back to the point about Maslow's hammer. Given the same toolkit, how would a newspaper company respond? For that matter, how many cutting-edge Web 2.0 pundits would have built the usual blog-centric presentation, with maybe a little bit of sweet Ajax goodness thrown in?

We are all subject to the Maslow's hammer effect.